The wonder of homemade soap

Viewpoints

November 7, 2009

Ike Adams The Richmond Register Sat Nov 07, 2009, 10:11 PM EST

So bear with me here. This column is eventually going to be about soap but I have to put it into a bit of perspective.

A few weeks back Grant Robinson, who lives here in Garrard County, sent me some lye soap that he had made from an old fashioned recipe. Grant is not in the soap making business, but he has had some time on his hands recently and as a result of retirement and excess energy, decided that he’d learn to make lye soap.

This is a fairly dangerous and ambitious undertaking, but Grant is an adventurous sort of fellow so he e-mailed me and told me that he’d come up with a recipe for soap.

It sounded sort of like, but somewhat different from, old times back there in the head of Blair Branch when I was growing up.

When I was but a child, brought-on bath soap such as Dial and Ivory and Irish Spring was a luxury that you got to use in the bathwater on Sunday night so you could go to school without smelling unpleasant on Monday and maybe even have a whish of nice aroma on your carcass when the morning bell rang. I’m reasonably sure that Monday was the favorite day of the week for all my grade school teachers.

We all smelled clean or we didn’t smell at all (much to be said for that) there on Blair Branch at the grade school on Monday mornings. And by Friday we all knew one another well enough that it did not matter that much if you smelled a little bit rank.

The deal was that you didn’t come to school on Monday smelling way too ripe, in which case a teacher might suggest you trot your behind back up the holler and take a bath. My mom would have died on the spot if that had ever happened to one of her boys.

However, it was okay to stink by the weekend, and we took a bath on Sunday night in a No. 2 wash tub whether we needed it or not.

But I’m off the point here, and point being that my Mom and my aunts would get together a couple or three times a year to make soap.

The leading cause of death in eastern Kentucky, though nobody realized it at the time, was pork. The diagnosis was heart attack or stroke. Every once in a while someone got cancer, but five times out of six people “fell dead.” Heart attack. Stroke. Or, as some old Baptists will proclaim, “called home at the end of a heartbeat.”

Called home, for sure. Way too much lard in the bloodstream, which is what happens when 75 percent of what you eat comes off a hog. And we didn’t raise beef there on the holler. No way to keep it, unlike pork, which we could salt down and use almost year round.

If my Mom had not insisted on raising white leghorn fryers which we ate throughout warm weather, I probably wouldn’t be alive today. Salt back would have killed me long ago.

So we killed hogs and stashed the meat there, salted down, to cure out in our “smoke houses.”

(I never, ever saw any smoke in a so-called smoke house, but Pap had salt-laden tables and Dad kept them going long after Pap was gone, where we laid out the dressed carcasses of hogs, covered them with thick layers of salt and we ate on pork chops, hams and shoulders and lean bacon from November until the first of May, when the pork ran out and we could start killing chickens.)

My mom and my aunts saved every scrap of bacon hide and trimmed-off fat from the seasoning pork, and they rendered it into quarts of brown, stinking lard in a huge old cast-iron kettle set atop an open fire just behind the house.

Aunt Nan and Aunt Lona knew the trick to render lye from wood ashes, and they would char pieces of oak firewood and soak them in a barrel and then drain off the water from a hole in the bottom of the barrel. Liquid lye. Dangerous stuff.

It didn’t smell good, did the soap, when the batch was all cooked down and poured into molds to cake up, but it made soap when they got done with it that would clean you for sure, if your skin didn’t come off in the process. And that’s basically what Mom used to do our laundry. Suffice to say that it came out clean.

The soap that Grant is making is oh so wonderful on my feet. He gave me three small cakes, and it is buttery soft and not nearly as strong as the stuff that my Mom and aunts used to make. Grant is onto something here, but he thinks his recipe went bad. Grant uses granulated lye than you can find in any hardware store and pure white lard.

I sliced of a few thin strips from one of the bars Grant gave me into a bucket of hot water Sunday night, stirred it until the soap was melted and then plopped in my feet into the tub. I’m betting now that I have the cleanest feet in Garrard County and they have not felt this good in decades. And they sure don’t smell up the place when I pull off my sneakers.

Text Only

Viewpoints

Republicans are making some noise
FRANKFORT — Last week’s news was mostly about Tuesday’s primary election but some Republicans who were not on the ballot also had interesting things to say.

May 26, 2012 1 Photo
Taking our Sunday night baths
There in the head of Blair Branch, when I was growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, we always took our weekly baths, even during cold weather, every Sunday night, whether we needed one or not.

May 24, 2012 1 Photo
Obama pursues higher tax rates
In the run-up to this weekend’s G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European “austerity” with Barack Obama’s economic policies.
European spending cuts, the argument goes, have hurt people and are arousing political opposition, while Obama’s proposals to keep federal spending at 24 percent of gross domestic product indefinitely are likely to succeed.

May 21, 2012 1 Photo
Graduation day
It’s that time of year. What’s the old song? “I can still remember...” And I do. It’s what I talk about when I’m invited to be a graduation speaker and what I write about every year at this time.
It’s about all those painful memories.

May 18, 2012 1 Photo
Recent news could cause panic for Obama campaign
Is it panic time at Obama headquarters in Chicago? You might get that impression from watching events – and the polls – over the past few weeks.

May 17, 2012 1 Photo
EPA goes medieval on Kentucky coal
EPA goes medieval on KRoman legions? Horrific crucifixions? Sacking dissenters and making examples out of their deaths?
These may sound like some of the gruesome tactics used by military commanders of the ancient world, but according to Al Armendariz, who, until recently, was regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, it’s much more relevant to modern America than we’d care to believe.

May 13, 2012 1 Photo
Don’t just pick out a card
When Anna Jarvis launched the movement for a Mother’s Day observance in 1908, her intention was to have everyone write their mother a letter, putting some thought and sincerity into thanking and telling her what she had meant to them.
Unsurprisingly, the idea caught on quickly and became very popular. But, Jarvis was disappointed with the outcome.

May 12, 2012 1 Photo
Returning to a calmer situation
FRANKFORT – After a two-month absence, I’ve returned to Frankfort where things seem calmer than when I left.

May 11, 2012 1 Photo
Saturday night with Bea
“They made me feel so small.”
Bea does my nails. I found her because she works seven days a week until 8 at night.
She sits at the front table, which in the world of Vietnamese nail salons means the money is in her drawer, and she’s the one who makes sure everyone gets their fair share of business.

May 10, 2012 1 Photo
Why are we in the dumps, again?
The many positive comments readers and friends have given my weekly column have motivated me to keep writing it.

May 5, 2012 1 Photo
More Viewpoints Headlines

Viewpoints

Search Results

The wonder of homemade soap

A recent health ranking listed Madison County as the 20th healthiest county in the state. It measured factors such as exercise, access to health care and smoking. Do you smoke cigarettes?

Site Map